Product Description

The “crystal cake” or “coca bread” is a sweet Catalan cake which is very thin, crunchy, and because it is covered with a layer of bright, smooth and transparent sugar, it looks like a coat of varnish or glass. We, of course, do it differently, with buckwheat and coconut sugar. Usually it is eaten for breakfast or tea, sometimes with a piece of chocolate. It is a typical dessert of Vallès Occidental, Catalunya.

The “Carquitast” is a gastronomic festival around the carquinyoli and other sweets: cakes, waffles, ears, etc. It is held the last Sunday in May in Espluga Francoli. On Sunday 31st May 2009 a”cocada” was organised with a 100 meters”crystal cake” washed with hot chocolate.

It must be a descendant of ancient yeast free bread. The bread was so important in human nutrition, which is considered as a synonym of food in many cultures. Bread is involved in many social and religious rituals, like matzoh at Passover, the Eucharist wafer Christian rite of welcome Slavs.

Some authors claim that bread was the staple of humanity since prehistoric times. One would imagine that at first it might have been a mass of semi-milled grains and slightly moist, which could have been cooked in the sun on a hot stone. There is another view, the “Paleolithic” diet, which holds that “before agriculture” humans would not be eating bread because they were nomadic. Settlements would mean agricultural work involving harvest, storage, grinding and cooking bread.

History:

Probably the first bread would have been made with fruit flour. They found fragments of unleavened bread the sites of the villages near the Swiss lakes. We know that the Egyptians elaborated bread baking ovens and used it as currency to pay wages.
In Rome, legionaries were given three pounds of corn a day, which crushed in a mill hand shared by a group of soldiers.
In the Middle Ages because of wheat shortage other cereals begin to be used.

The historical evolution of the bread is based on three elements: the improvement and evolution of the mechanical elements that pulverized grains (mills, etc.), improvement of microorganisms that populate the yeast and the evolution of the furnaces and elements that provide heat.